Category: Uncategorized

Not likely.

Not impossible. But not likely.

Let’s think this though, and the considerations for us thinking this through are not specific to Cyprus; they are pretty generic in etymology.

English was a donor language to Cypriot Greek while the British ruled Cyprus, from 1878 through 1960, and as an international language since. While there is English in Cypriot, there’s isn’t all that much; there’s a lot more Old French, Venetian, and Turkish. (Btw, if anyone reading thinks that Cypriot Greek tʃaera is a borrowing of English chair, stop that. It’s a borrowing of Old French chair.)

The first question to ask is: could the word be just Greek? The second question to ask is: could the word be English at all? If the answer to both is yes, then you may well be dealing with a contamination of the two sources: words don’t always have a single origin, especially if the two origins sound very similar.

So, first up, could someone come up with the term “horse” to describe an ironing board? Of course they could. An ironing board has four legs, and a flat back that you put things on. From Google, I see that ironing horse is occasionally used in English to refer to ironing boards. I’m not seeing any indication that the Standard Greek άλογο is used to refer to ironing boards, and I wonder whether ironing horse was calqued into Cypriot from early 20th century British English.

Second: could English apparatus have been borrowed into Cypriot, and conflated with the similar-sounding Cypriot apparos, to refer to ironing boards?

There’s several problems with such a possibility:

• How often were English terms borrowed for household items into Cypriot? Was English going to be the language used for household items at all, when relations between Cypriots and the British were nowhere near as intimate as, say, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots?
• Going from apparatus to apparos requires a slight leap of imagination. Not a huge leap, it’s not impossible, but it’s not tempting either.
• Why would you borrow apparatus as the word for an ironing board? As opposed to the specific name of the thing, ironing board? Or, you know, ironing horse. You might as well borrow the word beverage to refer to tea. That kind of thing can happen in language, but again it’s not tempting.
• Does anyone even refer to ironing boards as apparatus? *Googles* Ah they do: Patent US20130192102 – Ironing board apparatus and methods. Well, would anyone within plausible earshot of a Greek Cypriot in 1930, as opposed to someone in the US Patent Office in 2012, be likely to refer to ironing boards as apparatus?

I think coincidence is a more plausible explanation here.

My all-time stats start from 2013, not from 2010:

Of course, given that I joined in 2015, that makes my stats graph nowhere near as usefully granular as it could be.

Is there a way to view my Quora stats from the date you joined instead of 2013?

Not that I know of. Be grateful you can see your all-time stats at all. (Takes me about a minute.)

Habib le toubib, you already know about me having three cousins also called Nick Nicholas, and that I translated Hamlet into Klingon, so those things I won’t count as surprising.

So what should I count?

• I can dance. Not just dad dancing as I walk into a cafe, although I certainly do that. I do dance Greek dances, and I can pick the steps up for unfamiliar dances readily—although not if they’re from up north. (I did try to dance along to a 13/8 number from Florina/Lerin once. I really did try.) I have had salsa lessons too, although I think my hips are not yet Latino hips.
• In high school, the disciplines that fascinated me were mathematics and physics. No, you’re not missing any pearls of wisdom from me in those topics. When I switched to the humanities, I really switched. My engineering education had successfully killed off any love I had for those disciplines.
• Oh, and word to the Melbourne Uni Physics Department. If anyone thinks teaching students Special Relativity without teaching them Classical Mechanics first is a good idea? Fire them.
• You would think that, with my prodigious intellect, my analytical background, and my incisive insights, I’d be genius at strategy games, right?

  … Why the hell would you think that?!

  My gameplay in Civ—all iterations of Civ—was best summed up 15 years ago, by my colleague idly watching me play. “You’re not actually playing Civ at all, are you? You’re just randomly moving all the pretty horseys around the screen.”

  I do enjoy escape rooms. Though they’re not a good combination with anxiety disorder.

As Names of the Greeks – Wikipedia details, the name that the Byzantines gave themselves, and the name that Modern Greeks traditionally gave themselves as a result, was Romans: Romioi, with Hellene reserved for the Ancient Greeks (or for pagans in general).

It follows that the name Greeks traditionally gave their vernacular was Roman, Romeika, with Hellenic reserved for Ancient Greek. And this term entered 18th and 19th century English as Romaic.

In fact this book written in 1855 explicitly contrasts Romaic and Modern Greek: Romaic and Modern Greek. Romaic is what Greeks called Demotic, the spoken language; “Modern Greek” is what Greeks called Katharevousa, the diglossic written language.

Romaic passed out of usage by the end of the 19th century in English, as Demoticism gained ground and as Greeks grew uncomfortable with anything Greek being called anything but Greek. Romeika is obsolete now in Greek too, though many will still remember when people used to say “am I speaking Romaic to you?!” (same meaning as “English, m*thaf*cka, do you speak it?”). That’s “am I speaking Hellenic [Greek] to you?!” now, of course.

For the same reasons presented at Tatiana Estévez’s answer to Why does Quora delete all questions pertaining to the ban of Quora users?

It would be seen by Quora as violating BNBR, and it would be seen by Quora as embarrassing to writers. The scenario brought up recurrently by Quora moderators is the writer going for a job interview, and the prospective employers having Googled ahead the writer’s activity on Quora.

Nicholas, N. 1998. To aper and o opios: Untangling Mediaeval Relativisation. In Joseph, B.D., Horrocks, G.C. & Philippaki-Warburton, I. (eds), Themes in Greek Linguistics II. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 159) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 283-323.

Τὸ ἄπερ and ὁ ὁποῖος: Untangling Mediaeval Greek Relativisation

This was a very tangled paper, that kept tripping itself over.

The paper is about an oddity in legal documents written in official Greek in Southern Italy, between 1000 and 1350. These documents routinely featured τὸ ἅπερ, “the which”, as a relative pronoun. The problem with that “the which” construction is, the “the” was in the neuter singular, and the “which” was in the neuter plural. It is a construction that doesn’t appear elsewhere in Greek (though a singular/singular version does once or twice), and that makes no linguistic sense.

The construction is reminiscent of a Romance “the which” construction, which ended up in English, and also in Greek somewhat later (ο οποίος); but the documents seem too early to allow for that influence. The plural really makes no sense at all, and after tying myself in all sorts of knots trying to make sense of it, I end up mumbling that maybe another linguist’s suggestion that it was some sort of phonetic effect is it.

The really interesting thing was to look at the structure of the land deeds that the construction appeared in. The land deeds were highly formulaic, and the construction kept showing up in the same place, time and again: the definition of the land boundaries. However the construction got into the earliest land deeds, it got into the later land deeds through the monks robotically using those deeds as templates.

The paper has a common fault of my papers: it goes into way too convoluted reasoning, exploring every option and alternative, whether they are germane or not. In fact, the paper explores so many options, it ends up unreadable; several of them did.

Nice to see some questions never get old.

As of February 2017, there has been a steady drip of UX changes that seems targeted against the social use of Quora, and following in particular.

The feature without which I would abandon Quora are comments and following. If I wanted unsociable, one-way flow of information, I would time travel back to 1980 and read an encyclopaedia.

It’s a good question, Mehrdad, and it deserves a serious answer.

Language has functioned as a cohesive social force, much longer than the nation state has. Language has long bound people within an ethnic group, and those outside the ethnic group who also speak it. Language, it is true, is emblematic of ethnic groups, and is named after them. But that bond has never been so strong that the language has to be renamed, when the language spreads beyond the initial ethnic group.

And in fact, languages do not change name very often. The main motivation for changing a language name is when the old ethnic group no longer exists, and the language becomes primarily associated with a new ethnic group. You can argue that’s what happened with the Romance languages.

But English people still exist, and most Americans don’t object to their language being named after them. The English language is important to American nationalism, but the constitution and the flag are more important. The spelling and the dialect of English are unique to America, and that is enough for American nationalism. The name doesn’t have to be unique as well.

Based on historical precedent, it would take a cataclysm for English to change name. Most likely a cataclysm through which English people no longer understand Americans.

For Lyonel Perabo.

I am, I protest, a shy person. I’ve got the Meyer-Briggs to prove it: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What’s your MBTI personality type? A person who is uncomfortable and a wall-hugger in a new crowd. A person who finds it hard to mingle in the proverbial cocktail party. A person who gave up on conference dinners early on, because my God, I don’t know any of these randoms.

People who know me very well can corroborate this.

People who know me less well will think I’m talking crap.

Because once I find myself in an environment where I know people, I come out of my shell. And it’s very hard to stuff me back in.

Dad-dancing into the cafe for my morning latte. Greeting imaginary fans with a politician’s wave, as I walk into a restaurant with my honey (but only if it’s together with my honey). Guffawing and talking loudly in the pub about whatever recondite topic strikes my fancy (back when I used to go to the pub). Holding court at work about power dynamics (but only if I have an audience).

My ideal self is like that. Loud and Greek. Voluble and witty. Unabashed and unreserved.

That’s my ideal self. I have only noticed slowly that this wasn’t who I was most of the time; that I had fallen silent much of the day; that I was back in my shell after all.

But not at work, praise be. I’m the guy that the cubicles in the neighbouring office complain about.

And not on here, in the virtual equivalent of the cube farm. I think out loud here, and I live out loud. Not as unabashed as I think my ideal self is: any BNBR violations I’ve gotten have been about tone policing, rather than me actually being un-nice or dis-respectful. But voluble, certainly enough at times for me to have been reproached. And every bit as much the social butterfly and the connector as I seek to be, trying to draw people together, out and engaging with the collective. (Unless those people are shmucks. Then, I just avoid you, because I go back in my shell.)

It’s performance, the dad-dancing and the waving at imaginary crowds and the storming into the office late exclaiming “So! What did I miss?” It’s performance of an ideal self, who is not afraid, and not embarrassed, and not ashamed. You could argue that the real me is not that. You could argue that this is front, to shield the cowering real me, who broods when struck or reproached or found wanting.

You could argue that. I prefer to think that it’s all performance, all facades. The bravado, and the cowering both. They’re all stances and reactions. And if the loud persona banishes the quiet persona for a few hours a day, there’s a reason for it. It feels alive. It feels vindicated.

It sure as hell feels like me.

As I have admitted elsewhere, I am a dunce when it comes to philosophy. So my answer is going to be relentlessly positivist.

If we do not discriminate between entities in the world, we do away with any possibility of predicate logic. And in language, we do away with nouns.

If we do not discriminate between properties in the world, which have distinct intensions and extensions, we do away with propositional logic. And in language, we do away with verbs and adjectives.

With neither predicates nor propositions, we could still attempt to reason with what’s left. But what’s left would be so God Almighty fluffy and hippie, that I’d be reluctant to call it reasoning as I know it.

Why yes. Fluffy and hippie are positivist terms.